You know how many different moving parts it takes to run your business smoothly and continue to offer great tours and activities. With so many tasks to take care of, it can be hard to keep track of what needs to be done and when.
To make your life a little easier, we’ve compiled a checklist of the most important tasks you should be doing once a year to make sure your business is up-to-date and you’re providing the most accurate information to your customers.
Whether your slow season is during the summer or winter, take advantage of that time
General Business
Stay on top of your overall business strategy and improve operational efficiency. Evaluate your yearly performance and make adjustments along the way.
Pricing Strategy: Evaluate your pricing structure from last season, research what your competitors charge for similar experiences, and analyze your conversion rate to determine the best price point and any upselling opportunities for the upcoming year.
Annual Subscriptions: If you use third-party platforms to assist with marketing or operational efforts, run an audit to make sure your accounts are up to date, have competitive pricing, and are still performing well for your business.
Vision/Mission Statement : Ensure these statements are still an accurate representation of your business. Set aside some time to regroup with your team to discuss and reinforce your mission statement.
Staffing Requirements: Update employee & payroll information accordingly.
Evaluate your business needs to determine if you need to hire additional tour guides
Look into using a staff scheduling software
Booking Trends: Pull a Bookings Report in your Dashboard
De-clutter your inventory and eliminate any tours, add-ons
Dashboard
As your business changes from year to year, it’s important these improvements are reflected in your Dashboard. Do a quick check to make sure information in your Dashboard is up to date and consistent across all of your touch points.
Calendar: Send in a request to FareHarbor as early as possible to get next season's calendar built out with availability. The earlier you do this, the better. Remember, travelers like to plan their trips as early as three months in advance.
Policies: Check that your cancellation and health & safety policies are reflective of your current processes.
Users: Review user permissions
Locations: Make sure that all the locations and addresses listed in the Dashboard
Affiliates: Confirm your affiliate setups and commissions are optimized for your business model and to maximize revenue moving into the new year.
Campaigns & Promo Codes: Check that any promo codes no longer in use
1099-K: Verify the 1099-K mailing address
Website/SEO
Your online presence is more important than ever. Optimize your website and evaluate your SEO strategy to meet current industry standards and business needs.
Domain: Renew your domain hosting subscription and any other features associated with your domain like email accounts – most domains need to be renewed annually.
Not sure who your domain hosting company is? Visit ICANN ,
HTTPS: If your website isn’t secure, it needs to be! If you’re not sure, check your URL. If it starts with HTTPS your site is secure. If it starts with HTTP, it is not. Check out our guide on why you need a secure website.
Important Business Info: Update important information across your site such as pricing and hours of operation if they changed in the past year.
Check your website footer, FAQ page
Review and update this same information on your Google My Business page .
Website Refresh: Tweak your website at least once a year to stay up to date with the latest website design trends, improve user experience
If you’ve added any new tours, think about where on your website they should be featured and make sure you're featuring your best-selling activity on your website.
Are you making any of these 6 common website mistakes
Google Analytics: Review your GA data Make sure to look at data year-over-year (not period-over-period) for the most accurate insights for things like bounce rate
Check GA for page traffic details to understand which ones drove traffic and which ones didn’t.
Review your SEO performance
Check your site’s technical SEO to make sure metadata, links, and other factors are optimal. Review 6 common Google Analytics mistakes and how to fix them!
Make Any Seasonal Updates: If you only offer tours or activities during one or two seasons, update your website to let guests know when you will resume operations.
Include a notice or banner on your homepage that has the start date of your next season.
Do not remove any activity pages during the off-season as they likely have keyword rankings and authority you don't want to lose.
Marketing & Social Media
Put together your annual digital marketing strategy . It’s important to think about the big picture before you start implementing marketing tactics across all your channels to ensure everything is in alignment and will contribute to your goals.
Audit Your Marketing Strategy : Include social media post performance to understand what worked well and what didn’t.
Finalize Objectives: Align on objectives, goals, and KPIs for the coming year.
Define Your Audience: Identify the audiences and locations you want to target.
Local SEO & local marketing efforts are always worth revisiting. Grow your business with local SEO.
Platform Management: Determine what channels and platforms you want to focus your efforts on.
Update your pricing and business information on all platforms if it has changed in the past year.
Email Lists: Clean up your email marketing lists for any email campaigns.
The ‘Contacts Report ’ in your Dashboard will show you who has already opted in.
Budgeting: Set your marketing budget for the year. Utilize your previous year’s performance to help. Learn where to spend to have the most impact.
Set Up Campaigns: Set up gift cards and promo codes in advance based on your top-selling activities, upcoming sales seasons, or holidays. Get ahead of your promotions .
Plan Ahead: Create a calendar for the coming year, planning out any content you need to create or update.
For example – How many blog posts will you commit to a month? Who will write them? What will they be about?
We know there’s a lot to unpack in this one checklist, so don’t be afraid to take your time and tackle each task one at a time! After you’ve started this checklist visit your Profile page on Compass (via the main navigation) to come back to any of your In-Progress Checklists .
